In the same way that the phrase that best summarized the 2015-16 season was "three-one lead," 2016-17 is shaping up to be the year of the triple-double. In general, the 2016-17 NBA season seems to be producing some absolutely insane stat lines, from Anthony Davis' early run of 40 and 50 point games to DeMar DeRozan's absurdly hot early start.

But one other thing that we've seen in the early part of this season is a ton of triple-doubles. Led by Russell Westbrook, who's threatening to make history by becoming the first player since Oscar Robertson to average a triple-double over the course of a full season, NBA players are contributing to more phases of the game than ever before, and the result has been a real delight for stat-nerds. Read the rest of this entry

With the college basketball season now up and running, we've added the 2016 RSCI Top 100 recruits to Basketball Reference. RSCI stands for Recruiting Services Consensus Index and can be seen here. It combines the rankings from various respected sources into one consensus ranking. It should be noted that this consensus can under-rank reclassifying players like Thon Maker or Jamal Murray since they're not always taken under consideration by all of the rankers.

This page contains links to college stats for this season's top freshmen (when applicable) so could come in handy if you're checking out 2017 NBA Draft prospects.

Historical RSCI rankings are available back to 1998, if you're curious about their predictive value.

This data is accessible via the "High School Season Honors" section of our NBA Awards menu.

On November 22, 1945, the Detroit Lions hosted the Cleveland Rams. Although there had been some professional football games on Thanksgiving in the 1920s and 30s, this marked the beginning of a new era and an impressive streak. For each of the next 71 years, the Lions would play on Thanksgiving. The Dallas Cowboys officially joined in the fun in 1966, as football joined turkey, naps, and contentious political arguments as a universally recognized Thanksgiving Day tradition. Read the rest of this entry

We recently added player salaries for the 1984-85 NBA season to player pages. This is a cool addition, because 1984-85 was the first season of the NBA salary cap. Please note that these totals, as all salary data, are unofficial. These salaries are also incomplete. We have data for 210 of the 320 players who played a game in the 1984-85 season. The highest-paid player for this season was Magic Johnson ($2.5M). Michael Jordan, a rookie at the time, made a $550K, which is just barely over the 2016-17 rookie minimum salary ($543,471).

This addition gives us salary data for most players all the way back to 1984-85. The two seasons we're missing are 1986-87 and 1989-90. If you have data for either of these seasons, and would like to share it, please let us know.

With the new triple-double leaderboard, you'll notice that LeBron James will pass Fat Lever for sole possession of 6th-most triple-doubles all-time with his next triple-double. But Russell Westbrook, on pace for 20 triple-doubles this season, is nipping at his heels.

There's not quite as much drama on the 50-Pt games leaderboard, where Wilt Chamberlain has as many as the next 7 players combined. LeBron James, with 10 50-pt games, is the only active player in the top 10, currently tied with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for 7th place.

There have only been four officially recorded NBA quadruple-doubles, with one each by Nate Thurmond, David Robinson, Hakeem Olajuwon and Alvin Robertson. This is because blocks and steals were not official statistics until 1973-74, the year after Chamberlain (who reportedly had multiple unofficial quadruple-doubles) retired from the NBA.

With another 24-hour marathon in the books, another year of college basketball is officially underway! While this year will have a hard time topping the heart-stopping finish to last year's NCAA Tournament, the 2016-17 NCAA basketball season promises all sorts of fireworks, including one of the most talented collections of freshmen we've seen in years. As the season gets started in earnest, we wanted to take a look at a few of the freshmen receiving the greatest amount of hype and see what sort of things we can expect from them. Read the rest of this entry

We have recently made an addition to the Awards section on Basketball Reference. We now have NBA Coaches of the Month all the way back to the creation of the award in 1982-83. These winners can be found not only on the page for the award, but also on season pages and coaching pages. It should also be noted that from 1982-83 through 2001-02, there was one winner per month for the entire league. Starting in 2002-03, however, there was a separate winner from the Western Conference and the Eastern Conference every month. The all-time leader in Coach of the Month Awards (through the 2015-16 NBA season) is Gregg Popovich, with 16. He's followed by George Karl, with 12, and Pat Riley/Phil Jackson with 11 apiece. The leader among currently active head coaches is Doc Rivers, with 9 (and November 2016 could well end up being his 10th).

The NBA has been back in our lives for over two weeks and this year is already more lit than even the most optimistic observers could have guessed. Fears of a joyless march to Golden State Warriors vs Cleveland Cavaliers III have proven greatly exaggerated. Instead, this season is already shaping up to be the most fun in recent memory. Let's check in on a few storylines. Read the rest of this entry

As you may have noticed, on our re-designed sites we recently disabled the feature allowing you to export our tables directly to Excel. This was because updated browsers were no longer supporting the function and it was becoming problematic to keep up. However, this doesn't mean that you can't still easily export our tables into spreadsheets. There's just an extra step or two, now.

First, look for the "Share & more" tab atop the table you'd like to export. If you don't see this tab, it means the particular table you're looking at isn't exportable. Otherwise, hover over it and options will drop down (see image). Select "Get table as CSV (for Excel)", which will convert the table to comma-separated values.

Once the table has been converted to CSV, copy and paste the entirety of the table (or whatever section of it you want) into Excel, as text. You will now have an unintelligible, single-column mess in your spreadsheet, but that's fine. The commas are there for a reason and Excel will help us easily convert those commas into nice, readable columns of data. This next step is sometimes variable depending on the version of Excel you're working with, but what you want to find is the "text to columns" function. In my Excel for Mac 2011, this can be found under the "Data" tab. If you can't find it on your version, a google search for "Excel text to columns" with your Excel version number should yield useful results.

Once you have located the "text to columns" function, you will choose a file type that best describes your data. You will want to choose "delimited" since the fields are separated by commas. Next, you will choose the delimiter. Check the box next to "comma." Once you make that selection, you can finish up with the text to columns wizard and you should then have a nicely formatted spreadsheet.

We realize this is not quite as quick or simple as the old export function, but unfortunately we can no longer support that function. Once you get the hang of this method, you'll see it's also quite simple.

Every day during the season, we publish a sortable table showing the box score stats for every player who played the previous day. This table goes all the way back to November 1, 1946, the first day of the BAA (which merged with the NBL three years later to form the NBA). This table can easily be navigated to from our homepage by clicking "See all of yesterday's players" underneath the "Yesterday's Top Performers" table.

We've recently added a feature to this table, which allows users to isolate the rookies, by clicking "Show All Rookies" atop the table. This option will allow you to easily view and compare all of the rookies who played the previous day. This could come in handy for figuring out who will come in second in the Rookie of the Year race to Joel Embiid.